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In the Elder Days, creatures of "dreadful shapes", among whom are said to have been phantoms, haunted the Elves, dragging people into the darkness surrounding the borders of the Elven dwellings never to reappear.[3]

In Beleriand, the forest of Taur-nu-Fuin was an infamous locale of "phantoms of terror" said to strangle or pursue lost wanderers.[4]

Using wizardry, it was possible to summon phantoms of delusion. Sauron, "master of shadows and of phantoms",[4] devised a phantom resembling Eilinel to entrap Gorlim.[5] In the late Third Age, Saruman was rumoured to also be able to craft such phantoms.[6][7]

It is also told that disembodied, "phantom-like" Elf-souls (from Elves "who had been slain in the course of some wrong-doing") could maliciously appear before living beings to induce fear, being envious of people still alive.[8]

Phantom (from Middle English and Old French fantosme, from Latin phantasma), means "specter, spirit, ghost" or "illusion, unreality".[11]

The Quenya word fairë is glossed as "phantom; disembodied spirit, when seen as a pale shape" (pl. fairi).[10][9] The Black Speech word gûl is glossed (among other things) as "phantom".[12] The Qenya form qímar ("phantom"; qímari "phantoms") has been suggested as a reconstructed form deriving from linguistic material.[13][note 1]

In a "hastily written manuscript on small slips of paper, entitled ‘Reincarnation of Elves’",[14]Tolkien discussed different possibilities of how the houseless fëa of an Elf can have a "memory so strong that it can in another fëa (incarnate) induce a picture of it, so that it seems a phantom form". Such a phantom "cannot be touched, but can be walked through".[15]

Phantoms, one of the three type of ghosts, are those that seek revenge in their after-life. The phantoms "often resemble their mortal form as it appeared in death" (e.g., the phantoms of the Mere of Dead Faces), although some are also invisible.[17]